Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker who specialises in turning genres on their head. Her 2010 film, Meek’s Cutoff, is often classed as an anti-western: in it, the glorious pioneer myth comes tumbling back to earth, as a band of settlers trundle across a parched prairie with gold in their eyes and not enough water in their canteens. By the same token, her new picture, Night Moves, might be described as an unthriller, although it’s nevertheless as tightly wound and gripping as a thumb-screw.

Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning play Josh and Dena, two young environmental activists who want to “make a statement”. The film opens on them looking thoughtfully at a hydro-electric dam in the Oregon mountains, and we soon twig to the plan. Dena uses her savings to buy a speedboat, which they pack with home-made fertiliser bombs, mixed with the help of Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a former US Marine turned anarchist who wants to watch the world burn.

The name of the boat is ‘Night Moves’, perhaps after the Gene Hackman thriller from 1975, but more probably after the Bob Seger song about a couple who go “out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy” to make love under cover of darkness. Love, though, isn’t what these youngsters want to make.

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Eisenberg has a genius for crafting characters you hate but can’t take your eyes off, and until now, his Mark Zuckerberg, from David Fincher’s The Social Network, was the prime example. But Josh, from Night Moves, has Zuckerberg beaten: I couldn’t stand him within three minutes flat. Very early in the film we see him lurking at the back of a tent, rolling his eyes at a very earnest save-the-planet film made by Dena. A militant environmentalist and a hipster? Instantly you want this chump to be put through the wringer.

Reichardt and Jon Raymond, her co-writer, are happy to oblige, although they spend the film’s first hour meticulously laying the trap. Josh, Dena and Harmon carry out their scheme with diligence and little real panic. But then the film shifts gear, and Josh and Dena find themselves having to deal with the consequences of their nocturnal scheme.

Guilt plays across the faces of these two young Raskolnikovs in the flashing lights of police cars, the twinkle of crystal pendants and, for Dena, a red-raw anxiety rash. In a mordantly witty climax, terrifically photographed by Christopher Blauvelt, both she and Josh feel the stifling heat of judgement. The lesson that stays with you, though, comes almost 60 minutes earlier, in an idle conversation Josh overhears between his employer, the owner of a family-run organic farm, and one of his fellow vegetable-pickers, when news of the bombing first breaks.

“To have the slightest impact you’d have to destroy ten dams, a hundred,” says the farmer, unimpressed. “Yes, but didn’t they make a statement?” asks the vegetable-picker. “That’s not a statement,” he snorts. “It’s theatre.” It takes a rare talent like Reichardt’s to combine the two.